


Realm Switch Extras

by Lithosaurus



Series: Realm Switch [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-05
Updated: 2015-07-05
Packaged: 2018-04-07 18:16:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4273188
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lithosaurus/pseuds/Lithosaurus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bits of stuff that didn't fit into the plot line of the actual fic</p>
            </blockquote>





	Realm Switch Extras

Two Brothers  
Thor was 5 and Loki was 4 when he first heard it. Not that it was said out loud but it was said. One of his father’s ‘friends’ who really only tried to befriend power said it. ‘You have your mother’s eyes’ he had peered at the two of them like a snake judging if it was big enough for a meal. ‘And your brother will look just like your father’. Loki grinned shyly. The man smiled back. At the time he thought it was friendly.  
He liked Mother and Thor liked Father, it worked out nicely. It wasn’t until he got home and spent half an hour perched on the bathroom counter with a glossy photo of his parents that he noticed it. He didn’t have his mother’s eyes. Hers were blue like the granite counters in the kitchen and his were the same color green as Mother’s favorite jade pendent.  
He looked more like his mother than his father but that didn’t say much. Even now, with a baby face and hair color that could lighten, he didn’t look like his parents and he didn’t look like Thor. Father’s friend had been lying about his eyes. He eventually shrugged, hopped off the counter, and went to find his brother. They had a new nanny. Maybe she wouldn’t know all the tricks they had to get into the pantry. He was only four, he didn’t know anything about genetics.

Thor was 8 and Loki was 7 when he heard it again. This time from one of their classmates. Loki had been moved up a year to join Thor in the second grade and they were inseparable. Schools like Sidwell- made to keep the children of politicians, celebrities, and the wealthy- teemed with politicking from kindergarten and having someone he could trust implicitly was a relief. Thor trusted everyone, which was part of the reason he needed Loki. He even trusted this girl Stefanie who eyed them in a way not dissimilar to the man who first lied about Loki’s eyes to earn garner good sentiment.  
“I wish I could go to school with my cousin Nathan.” She said as they sat on the tire swing together. Thor had gone out of his way to spend recess with her and where Thor went Loki went, too.  
“I’d love it if my cousin an’ me were like you two are.” She continued.  
“Don’t you have any siblies?” Thor asked. ‘ings’ were still giving him trouble.  
“Two big brothers.” She answered. “But they’re brothers you have to like them. Cousins are cooler.”  
“I don’t feel like I have to like you, Loki.” Thor protested. “I just like you. Even if you ate the last of the cheerios this morning.”  
“You should’ve gotten up when Mother came to get us.” Loki sniffed.  
Stef frowned. “Are you two brothers?”  
“Yeah, Loki got moved up a grade this year. ‘Cuz he’s smart.” Thor beamed.  
“Oh, it’s just, you don’t look very much alike.” She carefully examined them again. “Me’n my brothers look really alike but Nathan ‘n me really only have the same hair. Mommy says our chins are the same but I don’t believe that.” She shrugged and leaned back to make the swing wobbled some more. Thor joined her and the tire began to rock as it swung back and forth. Loki gripped the chains harder. He wasn’t afraid, he could do anything the big kids could. The weird feeling in his tummy must’ve been because he ate too many of Thor’s cheerios.

Thor was 13 and Loki was 12 when Stef pointed it out directly. They had stayed friends since second grade, even when Loki was moved up another year and Stef got her wish for her cousin to come to their school. Not that Stef would have ever wanted the circumstances that brought it about.  
The first time Loki met Nathan was at his parents’ funeral. Stef sat next to him at the memorial. Thor and Loki were in the back. They were only the children of the deceaseds’ employer to most people. The cousins’ blonde hair stood out among the black clothes. It shone gold in the too hot sunlight. Nathan’s face broke and returned to its attempt at blankness throughout the service. Stef stayed stiff and solemn with ease, even when Odin approached them and personally thanked them for the sacrifice of Ellie and Marcus Fandral.  
When they returned to school, Nathan stuck close to his cousin and, by extension, the two brothers. It only took him to stop calling Odin ‘Mr. Blake’ or ‘Mr. Secretary’ for him to slot into their friendship easily. Even if Stef was stiff as a board in classes or in front of their parents, she still let a bit of her friendly, adventure hungry childhood out around the boys. When her mother caught them sneaking back into the house following an afternoon in the school’s locker rooms with far too much hair dye she looked relieved.  
“She thinks were growing up too fast.” Fandral explained when Thor asked him about it. He didn’t answer to Nathan anymore and his cousin was trying to get them to call her Sif, as a play on ‘stiff’. “She’s glad we’re still messing around.”  
“But we’re not kids.” Thor snorted. “And growing up with our parents doing what they do, they should expect that. But I do envy you. My father was livid when he saw my hair.” Thor gestured to his hat. Odin had shaved off his hair the moment he saw it dyed blue.  
“You’re lucky we couldn’t dye your hair.” Fandral nudged Loki. His hair had gone from wheat blonde to an unnatural red and he immediately admitted he didn’t like it. Sif was luckier. She’d gone with jet black and loved it. It looked nice, framed her face like curtains and matched her dark brows.  
“Yeah, lucky me,” Loki snorted. “I just had to wash green dye off my neck without any upside." Thor and Fandral laughed and moved onto another topic of conversation. Sif eyed Loki with that same look she gave him years ago on the tire swing, though far subtler.  
She found him by himself in the library later. She sat beside him and picked up one of the books in his stack. In any other context this would be normal. She would read and he would read next to her but today she was tense. Not fidgety exactly, but Loki could read her uneasiness.  
“Stef, come out and say it.” He invited her.  
“Are you gay?”  
The question blindsided him. He was expecting her to ask if he was actually Thor’s brother, he was wondering it himself. He’d barely thought about the possibility of him being gay. Father had always been carefully quiet about the subject of gays though Mother had made gestures at teaching them to be accepting.  
“I-” He opened his mouth to deny it then stopped. “I don’t know. I’ll get back to you.”  
Sif nodded and began to read in earnest. Loki had certainly never acted like Thor had around Sif or any other girl but he hadn’t acted that way around any boys either. For a moment he considered it, then considered how his parents would react.  
“If you need a girl to help you pretend I could help.” Sif offered.  
“It'd piss Thor off to no end.”  
“That’d be another benefit.”  
Loki laughed and returned to his homework.  
“You were expecting something else.” Sif said. “What did you think I was going to say?”  
“I don’t look anything like my parents.” He opened with the obvious. “And I don’t look anything like Thor. You told us that yourself in second grade.”  
“You don’t, not at all.” Sif pointed out. “But family doesn’t always look the same. My uncle and my dad didn’t look anything like each other.”  
“I know.”  
“Lo, you know that no matter what your family cares about you and Thor will love you like you’re the greatest thing since chocolate cheerios, right? It doesn’t matter if you ditch the family business and run off with a gay Broadway star; you’re loved.”  
“Broadway?” He sniffed with mock indignation. “I have much better taste.”  
“Yeah, well, if you do end up marrying anyone in show biz and need a place to crash you can come to my family.” Sif joked back. “I’d appreciate having an in on free tickets.” Loki recognized it for what it was but knew why Sif wouldn’t offer him such a thing without hiding it. It just wasn’t how the game was played in their families.

Thor was 15 and Loki was 14 when he finally accepted it. Thor wasn’t really his brother. Just like when Sif’s mom remarried and she got two new sisters. The government said they were sister and they had to get along but they weren’t actually sisters, and she didn’t love them like she loved her brothers. Her mom cared about them but she had loved their dad first and they just came with him. And Sif made sure they knew it.  
It was the damned AP Biology class that finally sealed the deal. Thor was set to take it in two years’ time as Loki had kept moving past him in grades. He had taken that stupid bio course and learned about the specifics of recessive genes. Loki read into the minutiae of human eye color and somewhere deep in his gut he’d always known. It only took a few strands of hair, a borrowed electrophoresis machine, and a few forensics texts to prove it for good.  
Odin and Frigga weren’t his parents.  
Thor didn’t know and he didn’t want to find out if Thor would care. Odin did and that explained a lot. The distance between them, for instance. Even if Odin was the head of the world’s foremost and least-known intelligence agency he had found time for his children, he just found more for Thor. Maybe if he hadn’t it wouldn’t have been so obvious. Thor was his favorite, always earning more praise for worse grades, less scorn for his failings, Odin even gave him the better personal trainer as part of their unofficial preparation for joining SHIELD. Special Agent Volstagg, the famous field agent, took Thor into his small group of elite trainees. While Thor was busy learning from the best, preparing to take the same route as Odin from field agent to handler to director, Loki got Arthur Heimdall. He hadn’t started with a resentment for Odin’s favorite regional secretary but the quiet, solemn man didn’t exactly try to teach Loki; he made him his goddamned PA. Every day, Loki spent the two hours between school and his mandatory martial arts training in the man’s office, organizing files and listening to him make his phone calls.  
He may have not started out with anything resentment for the spy but he certainly developed some. Thor came home and talked excitedly about the lessons Volstagg taught him, Loki came home and kept all the secrets he had read to himself. Thor spoke about learning how to drive armored vehicles and how to act as bodygaurd for politicians while Loki dealt with paper cuts and stories about how wrong deep-cover missions could go. Loki saw what passed over Heimdall’s desk and saw that the glory in SHIELD went to the men with guns, not the paper-pushers who kept them safe.  
He thought about telling Sif about his realization himself but he didn’t need to. She pulled him aside just over a week after his genetics experiment and casually mentioned that their biology professor was missing an expensive piece of equipment.  
“I’ll return it. I found out what I wanted to know.” He explained. She didn’t look at him like she felt any sympathy or pity which he respected. He still remembered her face as she held her cousin’s hand. Her aunt and uncle had been murdered, and her oldest brother had been killed on a protection detail just two months ago. He had no right to complain about his family, not really. He wasn’t his parents’ favorite but there were worse relationships to have and he still had Thor. Thor would never put two and two together, he’d do the mental equivalent of stuffing his fingers in his ears and yelling before accepting this harsh truth.  
Sif nodded, “You’re getting good at secrets, Lo. You’ll be good at your job.”  
“Thanks.” He whispered back. Neither doubted what that job would be, not anymore.  
Frigga had always known and he was beginning to suspect she had caught onto his discovery as well. As busy as she was, she still was his mother and still mothered him. She asked him about his classes, his work with Heimdall, what his interests for his future were.  
“I know we haven’t always been open with you and your brother.” She said to him. “You know why we couldn’t when you were younger. Sometimes I worry that we place too many secrets on you now. Are there any questions you have for me?”  
He shook his head. He was angry that she had waited so long to acknowledge this. He was angry that Odin treated Thor like his golden boy. He was angry at his brother (brother?) for not noticing. He was angry that he was angry with Thor over this. He was angry about a lot and not always for good reasons. His mother gave him a long sad look. She did that a lot now. Every few weeks she would ask him if he had any questions and would look like he dying when he didn’t answer.  
He thought about telling her what he realized his conversation with Sif two years previous. Telling her that her trouble child was even more trouble than she would ever expect might get her to stop asking for questions. In the end, he decided that a strained but manageable relationship was better than risking everything with a new problem. He would tell them once he was 18 and out of the house. Or 21 and done with school. Or 25 and through SHIELD’s training program.  
Or maybe not.

Thor was 17 and Loki was 16 when he said it to his father. It started as a family dinner that turned into a screaming match and he still didn’t know what cause the escalation, maybe he had just reached a breaking point. His mother sat at her end of the table looking as if her heart was being ripped out. Thor, across from him, looked like he wasn’t sure this was happening. Loki screamed out years of anger and Odin responded, frustratingly level headed as ever. Loki just wanted him to be honest or to show something. He was so used to Odin the spy, Odin the most powerful man in the room who never showed an ounce of emotion and always made his sons puzzle over riddles before understanding him. He wanted Odin to be angry at him, not to sit calmly and deny every accusation Loki threw at him. He wanted to be small and to have his mother hold him. He wanted Thor to stop looking like he had just betrayed him.  
The dining room was painfully silent when he stopped. Nothing echoed in the artfully decorated room but Loki still felt like he could hear the words he had thrown out. He stormed out of the room as Odin opened his mouth again, ready for another too-calm blanket denial that didn’t address what he’d actually said. He stormed to his room and threw his desk chair out the window without even thinking. He felt like he would never feel anything but rage ever again. The next thing he knew, his duvet was on fire and his room looked like a whirlwind had passed through it. He smothered the flames and fearfully looked at what he’d done. His dresser was tipped over and blocking the door despite taking both him and Thor to move it last time he rearranged his room. Smoke cloyed the air. There was blood on his palms and smeared on around the room but he didn’t know where it came from. Clothes and sheets lay ripped across the floor. His desk and bookshelf remained untouched, though he couldn’t remember avoiding them. He couldn’t remember doing any of this.  
He flinched when he heard a knock at the door. He didn’t know who it was but he didn’t care. He grabbed the go-bag his parent had made him keep in his closet since he was 5. The rhododendron bush below his window cracked when he landed on it. His ankles hurt and his dignity stung seeing the crushed flowers from his graceless escape but he was fine. The house’s security was designed to keep people out, not in so hurdling the wrought iron gate was painfully easy. His heart pounded in his ears as he ran down the streets of the peaceful gated community away from his peaceless home.  
Loki headed east, away from DC and SHIELD. Even though he knew that getting away from the Triskelion was false comfort; that SHIELD was everywhere. His hours with Heimdall had taught him how to hide in plain sight, to avoid cameras, years of kidnapping preparation taught him how to survive on the street. He could almost ignore the fact he didn’t know what he was doing. He could pretend that it was all an adventure that media had told him teenagers wanted but then he’d see something and turn to point it out to Thor. He missed his brother. He had been prepared to leave his parents and their politics and intrigue behind, to try for a normal life but he realized that he barely knew how to act without his tall, broad, blond brother. And he was his brother. Loki realized that about a day too late.  
Thor found him after a week. He was hiding and enjoying his time in a library in Memphis. He had prided himself on being aware of his surrounding, choosing his reading table carefully but he didn’t see his brother until he dropped into the seat next to him.  
“Loki.”  
“Don’t.” He snapped, and began shoving his books back into his bag.  
“Please, Lo,” Thor ignored him. “I don’t know what you’re feeling, I don’t know what happened to bring you here, but you’re my family.”  
Loki stood and slung his bag over his shoulder. Sif stood twenty feet off, between him and his primary run route. Fandral was next to her. Hogun, one of Thor’s training partners, covered his secondary path. Thor touched his elbow. The last seven days of tension and years of confusion hit Loki like a freight train making his throat tighten and his eyes water. He turned and pressed his face into Thor’s shoulder. He felt tears welling up but he hadn’t let Sif or the other see him cry yet, he wouldn’t do so now. Thor wrapped his arms around him, pulled him close so hard Loki felt like he couldn’t breathe. Or maybe that was the sobs he was desperately trying to hide.  
“How’d you find me?” His words should have been muffled beyond comprehension with his face still leaving tear tracks in Thor’s shirt but his brother didn’t appear to have difficulty understanding him.  
He laughed. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”  
“Try me.”  
“I had a goddamn dream.” Thor snorted, trying to pass it off as far less serious than he was actually taking it. “I had a dream that I followed you into this library and watched as you scouted out this table. You sat down then looked up and asked if you could come home.”  
Loki didn’t move. Thor’s heart had started beating faster when Loki asked the question but hadn’t changed as he spoke. He stepped away from his brother and looked him the eye. He absently noticed the others were gone. A wet patch covered Thor’s shoulder.  
“Did you see what my room was like?” Thor nodded. “I don’t remember doing that. I don’t know how I moved my dresser by myself.”  
“Adrenalin?”  
Loki shrugged.  
They stood together waiting for the other to say something. For the first time in years Loki could see his brother didn’t know what to do next.  
Thor picked up his bag. “Do you want to go home?”  
Loki nodded  
Volstagg was waiting with a SUV in front of the library. He wasn’t wearing a suit or any of SHIELD’s uniform, just jeans and a flannel over an old t-shirt. It was what he called his ‘dad armor’. Hogun was in the front seat and the Fandral cousins were in the back. No one said anything when Loki and Thor slid into the middle seats. Volstagg started the car and started driving east.  
They pretended nothing had changed on the drive. It felt like five friends and their adult-supervision-in-name-only like they had been for years. The two brothers both knew exactly what was waiting for them yet they didn’t have a clue.

Thor was 24 and Loki was 23 when the brothers both officially joined SHIELD. It surprised some. Loki never repaired his relationship with his father after that one explosive night and the tension was noticed at the agency. Most, including their mother, expected Loki to separate himself as much as he could from SHIELD. Thor wasn’t surprised. Where one brother went, the other followed. Loki had spent an extra year at Sidwell taking independent study Advanced Placement classes to graduate with his brother. Thor stretched out his last two years at George Washington University so he could finished with Loki and his double majors in physics and English literature. They applied for SHIELD employment the same day.  
Thor joined a slew of probationary agents training under his old mentor, Volstagg. He had familiar faces in group. Loki wasn’t as lucky. He worked part-time with SHIELD’s in-house scientists, more on merit of his security clearance surpassing that of his supervisors than his experience. Lacking experience or not, Loki was still the son of Director Blake, he still was the sharpest person in the room at any one moment, and he still had every drop of cunning and determined ambition that he always had.  
Both brothers climbed the authority tree quickly. Thor became respected for his courage, leadership, and unshakeable moral compass, which was needed by SHIELD more often than it should have been. The few who didn’t like him personally respected his success and the efficiency of his Strike Team. To most, Loki gained respect for his soft-spoken politeness and his achievements with SHIELD’s scientific consultants. If he wasn’t the friendliest person he made up for it by staying a step ahead of most of his co-workers.  
But to a certain circles, Loki was respected for a different aspect of his intellect. He’d been groomed. Odin had done so with both of his sons but Loki had been groomed for a different purpose. His role with the scientists who kept their heads in their data was only part time, after all. Thor may have been SHIELD’s conscience when needed, but Loki knew when good conscience needed to be sacrificed. If Director Blake had need for a cunning agent with extreme skill and a lack of moral objections, he never had to look far. Both brothers found places for them at SHIELD.

Thor was 30 and Loki was 29 when reality ripped open and took Loki with it.


End file.
